By Father Thomas Hopko
So you have this kind of symbolical way of speaking about the condition of being dead. And so it can sound somehow like a place, like heaven would be a place, Sheol would be a place. But all the holy fathers, and many of the modern writers, for example Hierotheos Vlachos, the Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, a very famous, well-known writer of Orthodoxy, today many of his books are translated into English, he makes it clear that heaven and hell are not places. They are situations, they are conditions, they are spiritual realities in which we find ourselves. But one thing is for sure, to be physically dead is to be physically dead. And it is a dogma of the Eastern Orthodox Church that Jesus of Nazareth physically died, and He was buried, put into a cave as a dead man. That is just affirmed over and over again, that He really became a corpse, He was dead.
It is also affirmed that He was raised on the third day, that He did not see corruption, that the Holy One could not see corruption, that He did not remain dead and could not remain dead, as being the very life and the power of God, Himself. It was impossible that He would die, being the divine Son of God, but even in the incarnation, as a man, it was impossible that this Holy One should see corruption, and that He, even as a man, had the capability of keeping Himself alive in His communion with God the Father, that He could raise the dead, He had all the power of God. So His death was voluntary, His suffering was voluntary, the passion was voluntary, but it was real. When He dies, this is depicted and spoken about as a descent into Sheol, in other words, entering into the condition or the realm of being dead, that He really was among the dead. He was numbered, not only among the transgressors, but among the dead. He really died.
Some confusion is caused, particularly in English-speaking worlds, when this Hades or Sheol is translated and interpreted as “hell”—many of our English liturgical texts use the term: “He descended into hell,” and so on. It can be very confusing if you use this translation.
I believe, personally, that the word “hell” should not be used, for a very simple reason. It wasn’t hell. It was not Gehenna. In Scripture, you have the expression, Gehenna, which was a smoldering garbage heap outside of Jerusalem, where even the dead people were burned up, and somehow it was like a garbage heap of corruption and smoldering fire. But Sheol, Hades, is not Gehenna. And in fact, in a certain sense, it is not even a place of torment, because the teaching is that the righteous dead, like Moses, and the prophets, and John the Baptist, were not suffering in Sheol or Hades. They were certainly dead, but they were somehow also alive, because according to Scripture, according to the Bible, and here we have to be very careful that we do not slip into the realm of Platonistic philosophy in speaking about souls, the Bible does not know anything about disincarnate souls, but the Bible does teach us that a dead person who is righteous, before the coming of the Messiah, was in the hands of God, that the righteous were held in the hands of God. They were somehow preserved in the bosom of Abraham, and there was even some type of consciousness there, an expectation of liberation, so that the graves could be opened and the whole cosmos could be restored and everything could become Paradise again.
~Thomas Hopko, The Descent of Jesus into Hades, http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/hopko/the_descent_of_jesus_into_hades.
